Pune: Only about 50 per cent of 86 lakh registered tax payers from across the country are likely to have filed their GSTN-3B returns by Friday, August 25, the last day to file GSTN-3B returns under the newly implemented Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime.

Pune: Only about 50 per cent of 86 lakh registered tax payers from across the country are likely to have filed their GSTN-3B returns by Friday, August 25, the last day to file GSTN-3B returns under the newly implemented Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime.

The deadline, which was originally August 20, was extended as the GST portal had crashed on August 20. According to Sanjay Phadke, Head, GST, Vayana Network, a GST Suvidha Provider from Pune, only 15 per cent registered tax payers had filed their returns as on August 22. “The number could have risen to about 50 per cent by Friday,” he said.

He said that many persons and businesses faced certain problems while filing the returns, but also clarified that most of these were transitional issues. “Among the problems faced by people was in relation to filling of forms under 3B. People have not filled a 3B form before and were used to challans, which caused difficulties in the filing. Some problems were also faced pertaining to transfer of tax credit,” he said.

Phadke further said that the website crashing and slow resolution of issues faced during filing led to several difficulties. “However, these are all transitional issues and we are certain that from the next month, issues such as non availability of credits, forms and other errors will be solved and the process of filing the returns will be much smoother,” Phadke added.

Vinod Parmar from Vayana Network said, “The GSTR-3B process was extended till Friday since the GST portal had crashed on August 20. This summary return filing process includes uploading of data, payment of taxes and preparation of cash ledger. The uploading of the data part of this process takes some time, so we are advising businesses to ensure they upload all the relevant data before to avoid last minute rush. Once the data is uploaded, they can simply go ahead and pay their taxes.”